Right, all you see is the IP address. And anyone in the world can set up an “individual” VPN just for them on a cheap VPS or cloud server anywhere else in the world. There’s no technical way to accomplish what they’ve mandated, only something approximating it like “block all connections from known commercial VPN services”.

This isn’t true. Hosting providers have known IP blocks. Spin up a hand rolled VPN through a VPS and you’ll get blocked by a lot of services, or at the very least, treated as highly suspicious.